


paper faces on parade

by lazyfish



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Masquerade Ball, Multi, Polyamory, SHIELD is a paper clip company, don't ask me why it just is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 22:49:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16796227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyfish/pseuds/lazyfish
Summary: Elena meets three mysterious strangers at a masquerade ball, and hopes to find a fairy tale ending.





	paper faces on parade

The ballroom is much bigger than Elena expected it to be, and she pauses at the entrance, craning her neck upwards at the domed ceiling. Whoever had decorated the place had done an amazing job - tiny, twinkling lights are spotted across the dome, shining like stars in the otherwise dim lighting of the ballroom.

Elena’s never considered herself indecisive, but it’s impossible not to feel a little paralyzed as she surveys her surroundings. She can’t even spot someone that she knows in the gently seething mass of people - everyone’s wearing masks that obscure their faces. She’s wearing a mask, too, since it had been a condition for entry, but she had been expecting to take it off as soon as she got inside. Evidently, that’s not going to happen.

She starts moving before she can start holding up the line behind her. At first she’s just moving to move, but when she spots the table with the punch and refreshments, she decides that’s as good of a place as any to begin her night. While she walks, Elena sends not-so-surreptitious glances to the people around her. Everyone looks  _ good _ \- they had put more effort into their outfits than Elena had expected from employees of a paper clip company.

The punch table is fairly crowded, as many others seemed to have the same idea as Elena about starting their night with a drink. There are elbows flying everywhere - some accidentally, but some, Elena suspects, purposefully - and it’s only a matter of time before Elena is a victim of a well-placed jab. It sends her stumbling straight into another person.

“So-” The second syllable of her apology dies on Elena’s tongue when she cranes her head up to look the woman she had just run into in the eyes. She’s taller than Elena by at least half a foot, and her blue eyes sparkle beneath her feathered mask.

“It’s not a problem,” the woman says, voice soft and smooth like satin. “It’s crowded.” 

Elena expects that to be the end of the conversation as they both get their punch, but the other woman smiles and asks, “Would you like to dance?”

Elena has a really million reasons to say no, up to and including the fact that she doesn’t want her sexuality being the source of office gossip for the next three months, but that’s when she realizes - no one knows it’s her. She can’t recognize anyone, so it follows that no one can recognize her. That means that she can dance with the tall blonde stranger without fear of what those with loose lips will say. Not that Elena  _ minds _ , exactly - she’s mostly out - but it’s rather exhausting to have everyone think that who she loves is their business.

“ _ Si _ ,” she answers. The woman smiles. Elena’s fairly sure it’s meant to be seductive… and honestly, it’s working.

“We kind of match, you know,” the woman says as she leads Elena onto the dance floor. “With the animal masks, I mean.” She places her hand on Elena’s waist, assuming the leading position. Their fingers twine together, and Elena’s never been more relieved in her life. Looking up videos of how to ballroom dance on YouTube had been a good choice.

“Your mask is beautiful,” Elena compliments. “But what do you look like with it off?” The other woman’s eyes are so,  _ so _ blue, and Elena just wants to know what they look like not hidden behind a veil of black feathers. 

“I’m not going to be the first person to take my mask off, darling,” the woman says with another smile. “Takes the fun out of it, no?” She spins Elena effortlessly, proving that the elegance oozing from her hadn’t been just a product of the high bun and pretty dress. 

“I don’t like surprises,” Elena answers with a shrug.

The woman squeezes her hand softly. “Not even when they’re good ones?”

“I like having all the information.”

“Pity, because I’ve been told I’m not that forthcoming,” the woman says. “I’m not even going to tell you my name.” It’s supposed to sound teasing, but Elena finds the comment feels like a ball of lead in her stomach. Maybe it’s just the silly, schoolgirl-esque joy that comes from being asked to dance, but she likes the blonde woman. She likes the confidence and poise, the surprisingly strong arms and crystal blue eyes.

“Then I won’t tell you mine,” Elena says, tilting her chin up stubbornly.

The blonde laughs, the sound rich and sweet. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Elena doesn’t know how something the color of water can burn like fire, but the other woman’s eyes are smoldering and for just a moment, Elena thinks it would be lovely to burn. It is illogical, but feelings rarely are logical to begin with. Elena, above all, wants to feel.

Maybe it’s not meant to be with the woman, though, because the music stops, and they part ways with hardly a backwards glance.

\---

Running into people is, apparently, Elena’s strong suit, because it’s not ten minutes later that she finds herself careening into someone else. He catches her before he can fall to the floor - not that Elena would have fallen. She doesn’t believe in high heels, or in dresses for that matter, so she’s dressed sensibly enough despite the formal occasion.

“Woah, my bad,” he says, releasing her once it’s obvious that she’s not going to fall over without him. 

“Apparently I can’t stop myself from running into people,” Elena mutters, more to herself than to the man in front of her.

“I think I ran into you.” The man smiles at her underneath his turtle mask, and Elena appreciates his magnanimous nature when the collision was obviously her fault. Again.

She’s half-expecting to be asked to dance again, but the man - who, she realizes, is  _ much _ taller than she is - just guides them both out of the way of the rest of the employees, so they won’t risk running into anyone else while they sort themselves out.

Her knee-jerk reaction is to introduce herself, but that seems silly. She keeps coming back to the fact that she’s wearing a mask. Turtle Man has large, warm hands, and Elena can still feel the ghost of them on her arm. 

“I like your,” she gestures to his mask, the word somehow escaping her. Elena can feel a flush creeping up her neck, and Elena doesn’t know why. He’s nicer than she would expect from someone who was just smashed into, but not cool and unnerving the way the woman before him had been. He smiles at her compliment, and Elena smiles back.

“Yours is nice, too. Jaguars are cool.”

“Turtles aren’t,” she says unapologetically.

“What!? Why don’t you think turtles are cool!?” He seems more offended than the situation warrants.

“They’re too slow.” Elena crosses her arms over her chest.

“Stop and smell the roses!” He argues.

They banter back and forth as the crowd swirls around them, and all Elena can look at is his lips. Would it be weird to kiss him? It would be, she thinks. But she can’t stop staring nonetheless.

She doesn’t get to kiss him, though; that’s not the way the world works. The conversation peters off, and they find an excuse to part… even though Elena keeps looking over her shoulder for a flash of a green turtle mask. 

\---

The balcony is empty when Elena steps out onto it, and she sighs in the minute relief of being free from prying eyes. She considers taking her mask off to allow her face some time to cool down, but she’s now irrationally preoccupied with making sure no one else sees her face. The night is almost over, and it would be a shame if everything fell apart in the last hour or so before her departure.

Just as she’s leaning against the railing of the balcony, her shoulders relaxing, the balcony door swings open again. A brief blast of music hits her ears before the door thumps shut again.

“Sorry.” The voice is apologetic, and laced with a British accent. “I didn’t realize that there was anyone else out here.” The man who had just walked onto the balcony makes to leave, but Elena waves her hand, beckoning him back out. She can’t fault him for wanting to hide from the rest of the party, since that’s exactly what she’s doing.

“It’s nice just to slow down sometimes, don’t you think?” The man sidles over to her, and Elena is slightly shocked by how bright his hazel eyes manage to be even in the dim glow of the moonlight. It really is unfair how everyone at Shield Paperclips is, apparently, extremely attractive while masked. (Elena is choosing to believe it’s because she’s never met these people before, not because she’s horribly shallow.)

“I’m not sure I agree,” she says, the corners of her lips ticking up into a smile. “I like to go fast.” She expected that he did, too, whatever he said. His mask was a stag - the antlers really were stunning - and they weren’t exactly known for their lethargy.

“Please tell me you didn’t see the man in the turtle mask.”

“Oh, I did.” She had done more than see him, too. “Turtle Man and I get along surprisingly well for two people of such opposite philosophies.”

“Balance, right?” He asks. “Though maybe judging someone based just on their mask is a little…” He pauses, searching for a word.

“Reductive?” Elena suggests. 

The man nods. “I mean, if we were going just by mask designs, you’d eat me.” His eyes glimmer, and he grins at her with a boyish mischievousness that Elena thought had all disappeared from men old enough to have jobs. It’s not a bad look on him, though. Elena would go so far as to say it’s a very  _ good _ look.

“If I get my way, I’m never the one doing the eating in my relationships,” Elena says. She’s not worried that the innuendo is going to go over his head, and she’s not disappointed. The man laughs a deep belly laugh, one that warms the chilly night air.

They continue trading teasing jibes back and forth, and all the while Elena searches for clues as to the identity of the man under the mask. For someone who seems so open, he’s skilled at dodging questions that might make it too easy to identify him. Maybe, Elena thinks, there is a metaphor to be found in their respective masks; eventually, the predator always catches the prey, but not without a bit of a chase.

Of course, that metaphor is slightly creepy, and Elena shudders. Her companion notices, obviously, and tilts his head to the side. “Are you cold?” 

“No,” Elena lies. That hadn’t been the reason for her shiver, but she is cold. She had mostly been able to ignore the chill creeping into the night air, but it became impossible once she focused on it.

“Here.” He takes off his jacket and slings it around her shoulders in a move that is surprisingly gentlemanly for someone who has spent the last fifteen minutes making bawdy jokes. She blinks, unsure of what to do other than thank him. She does with a slight stutter in her voice, mentally cursing her ability to be so easily thrown just because someone has pretty eyes. It’s not the first time it’s happened tonight either, which is entirely unfair.

“I think everyone’s headed out,” the man says, gesturing back towards the ballroom, which is indeed emptying. 

Elena makes to take the jacket off to return to him, but the man shakes his head. “Keep it, sweetheart. I’m never wearing a ruddy suit again if I can help it.” He flashes that damnable grin at her, and without a further word, ducks back inside to get lost in the throng of people.

\---

Elena goes to sleep the moment she gets home, but the next morning, she is keenly aware of one thing: she needs to find the people from the masquerade. There’s a voice in the back of her head that nags her, saying she should choose just one to find, but that voice is entirely idiotic. Elena has never had more than one partner before, but there’s still time to change that - assuming that any of them want to partner with her at all, which may be a narcissistic assumption in the first place.

The easiest one to start with is the man in the deer mask, since she actually has something of his. She had turned out the pockets of his jacket, but found nothing there except a half-empty pack of gum. She knew his suit size and that he liked peppermint gum, and that he was British and had hazel eyes. That had to be enough to run a database search, right?

Except for that she didn’t have access to the employee database, and she’s fairly certain that anyone from HR would entirely disagree with her about what warranted a database search. The whole point of the masquerade was its anonymity, as Elena had recalled several times. Still… it was worth a shot, wasn’t it?

Either way, it would have to wait until Monday.

\---

God was laughing at her. Elena just  _ knew _ that God was laughing at her, because there was no way that this would have happened without literal divine intervention.

She had walked into the HR department intending to sweet talk whomever looked most susceptible into running a database search for her, when she had seen him. Elena’s not sure what gave it away, but she knows that, sitting in the desk in front of her, is the man in the deer mask.

She doesn’t know what to do, other than approach his desk.

“Good morning.” His head snaps up, his eyes glowing hazel when he looks at her.

“Did you really use the jacket to find me?” He asks. “Does this make me Cinderella?” His smile is just as beautiful in the daylight, even more so when she can see the way it changes his whole face.

“Let’s pretend I did,” Elena says with a smile. “So, you work in HR.”

“I do. And you work…?”

“Advertising,” she finishes. “I’m working on a line of promotional yo-yos.”

“Yo-yos… to promote paper clips.” The man says slowly. 

“It’s new-wave advertising,” she says with a wink. Then, because it’s a crime that she’s gone so long without introducing herself, “My name is Elena.”

“Lance. Or Hunter, but Lance is like, my name name.” He grimaces. “People just started calling me Hunter - you know what, you probably don’t care.”

“No, I do,” Elena insists.  _ Tell me everything _ is a little much, especially just having met, but… she does want to know more about him. “Here.” She grabs a pen and scrap of paper on his desk, scrawling her phone number. “I have to get back to work, but… call me.”

\---

It turns out that Lance Hunter is exactly the sort of HR employee that would search employee records to find someone from the masquerade, which is excellent,  _ especially _ because he apparently also talked to the woman in the bird mask and the man in the turtle mask - Mockingbird and Turtle Man, according to him. They seem to have a mutual understanding that both Mockingbird and Turtle Man are smoking hot, and even though Lance and Elena spend much of their free time with their tongues in each other’s mouths they’re definitely willing to spread the love.

They’ve narrowed it down to a pool of three suspects for Turtle Man and two for Mockingbird; Lance is confident that if he heard either of them speak he would be able to peg them, but that involves getting one of the suspects into earshot.

Lance has no ideas, but Elena’s been invited to a meeting with one of Shield’s research teams in hopes that it’ll make her better able to hype the scientific part of the company. Why a paperclip company needs an R&D division, Elena knows not.

She’s not looking forward to this meeting, mostly because she’s certain it’s going to be people spitting facts that she doesn’t understand at her. She’s fluent in English, but ‘fluent’ doesn’t cover knowing the vocabulary of material engineers, most of whom have PhD in the subject.

She’s the first one in the meeting room - probably because she’s the fastest walker. She shoots off a text to Lance about how boring her life is about to be, but he doesn’t respond. He had told her earlier that there was some sort of security breach in the HR department, which sounded like a big problem. Not her circus, not her monkeys, though.

Various researchers and members of other advertising teams file into the room. Elena mostly doesn’t pay attention, until a tall blonde strides into the room. Barbara Morse had been one of their possible Mockingbirds - Elena hadn’t known that she was going to be at this meeting.

Not only is Barbara  _ at _ the meeting, she’s the one leading it.

And yes, she’s definitely the Mockingbird.

When the meeting is over, Elena is about to send a text to Lance to tell him she found Mockingbird, when she sees a message from him, sent about fifteen minutes previous.  _ I found Turtle Man _ . This is the closest thing to a storybook ending that Elena could have hoped for.

“Excuse me!” She calls before Barbara can leave the room. Shit. She hadn’t planned what she was going to say. 

“Sorry, I’ve got to get going,” Barbara says apologetically. 

Shit! Shit! Shit!

What Elena does not expect to happen is for Lance to appear in the doorway, quickly followed by a hulking mass of muscle that is Turtle Man. Alphonso Mackenzie must have been the man they were looking for, since he was the one behind Lance.

“Excellent, we caught you!” Lance says gleefully.

“Mack?” Barbara asks, unsure. 

“This idiot is the one with the deer mask,” Mack says, swatting the back of Lance’s head. “And he claims that she,” he points to Elena, “is the woman in the jaguar mask.”

“Claims?” Elena asks, hackles rising.

“She is,” Barbara asserts.

“Alright,” Mack says. It’s obviously easier for him to trust Barbara than Lance, which Elena supposes makes sense - she would trust Lance more than either of them.

“I propose we sit down and have a discussion,” Lance says, voice oddly prim and proper. Elena smirks at him.

They do end up having a discussion - but not in the conference room.

They have it in Mack’s king-sized bed. Naked. For a discussion, it doesn’t involve a lot of talking.

They have time for that later.


End file.
